File Server Builder's Guide
by Zach Throckmorton on September 4, 2011 3:30 PM ESTAs motherboard layout is important in ensuring that airflow is as unobstructed as possible, case design is also critical in facilitating excellent airflow. If you're building a system with one or two hard drives, most cases work fine for a home file server - just make sure there is a fan near the hard drive(s) so it is not sitting in stagnant air. However, if your server requires multiple disks, here are a few cases that work especially well for file servers.
Mini-ITX
Fractal's Array R2 is a nearly perfect home file server case. At less than 14" deep by 10" wide by 8" tall, it occupies little volume. It positions a removable hard drive cage immediately behind a quiet yet powerful 140mm intake fan. The hard drive cage accommodates up to six hard drives using vibration-dampening silicone mounts, and there is also room for a 2.5" drive (either an SSD or HDD). According to my testing, when stuffed with six low-rpm 2TB mass storage HDDs and one SSD (with an Intel Pentium G620 CPU installed), the temperatures of the HDDs hover around 40C even when all drives are under artificial sustained load (using Iometer). The PSU is a custom SFX form factor model, 80+ efficiency 300W unit with ample amps on the split 12V rail to power six HDDs. The PSU features seven SATA connectors and one legacy molex connector, so there are no extraneous molex plugs and enough SATA plugs. Furthermore, the cables are shorter than typical, so excessive cabling does not interfere with airflow. The case itself is constructed of aluminum so it is lightweight, and its overall build quality is very high. It does not have room for an optical drive, but I consider optical drives superfluous for a home file server. If necessary, you can always hook up a USB interface external optical drive. The only drawback of this case and its PSU is the price: at just under $200, it is not cheap. However, the subjective aesthetics, objective functionality of the case and the custom PSU are worth the cost if you want a small but capacious home file server case.
Micro-ATX
As I prefer home file servers that take up as little space as possible, Silverstone's TJ08B-E is a great, smaller micro-ATX minitower. It's less than 16" deep, 9" wide, 15" tall and weighs less than 12 pounds. It can accommodate up to five HDDs plus one SSD. As with the Fractal Array R2, the hard drives are placed immediately behind a front intake fan - though in this case, it's an even larger 180mm unit. The TJ08B-E is flexible in that it can hold a couple optical drives as well as a GPU in case you want to repurpose or multipurpose it. When stuffed with four low-rpm green drives, the temperatures under load don't exceed 45C during sustained transfers. Overall build quality is very good, like most Silverstone cases.
Silverstone makes a diminutive, fully modular PSU that makes working with smaller cases like the TJ08B-E, Lian Li PC-Q08, and others much easier. Silverstone also offers a short cable kit, making the ST50F-P PSU even better suited to SFF cases. Finally, it's clear that Silverstone had smaller multi-HDD systems in mind when designing the CP06 SATA power plug extension cable. This extender connects to a single SATA power plug and then has four SATA power plugs that are spaced closer than usual together, further reducing cable clutter. Though the cost of these accessories adds up, they make an ideal cabling solution very easy to implement. Regardless of whatever PSU you decide to go with, if you use a split 12V rail model, make sure you don't load up one rail with HDDs. If you go with a single 12V rail model, you'll want that rail to be beefy - for example, don't try to put ten HDDs and four case fans on a budget PSU with a 20A 12V rail.
Full Tower
Very few cases can accommodate ten HDDs at stock (without adding adapters), and such cases are not at all small. Full towers also typically offer excellent airflow, and cable management is not very difficult. Fractal's Define XL is one of the least expensive 10 HDD bay full tower cases available. It is well-built, and extra care has been paid to making the case quiet in the form of panel insulation. It is impossible to hear active HDDs inside this case even when you're sitting just a few feet from it (even the notoriously loud VelociRaptors). Further, there are plenty of integrated niceties like adjustable/flexible cable baffles that assist in cable management. Seven of the ten HDD slots are immediately behind fans, with three slots one cage removed from the front intake fans. Even still, the HDDs that aren't right behind the fans stay cool (between 35C and 40C). At around $150, it is an excellent value. Just make sure you don't pair it up with Silverstone's short cable kit!
We've saved the most important aspect of a home file server - the hard drives - for the next and last component page.
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praeses - Monday, September 5, 2011 - link
I'm doubtful it is the most widely used platform for home users, but it does offer some pretty attractive features such as spinning down individual drives in the array, mix and match sizes, and isolated data loss with multiple drive failures. It seems like a better "drobo" and its not necessarily just a NAS as this article is trying to distinguish from.nevertell - Monday, September 5, 2011 - link
I wouldn't use any cpu that isn't able to transcode 1080p streams, as that would be the best use of such a box. If I use a ps3 to watch movies, I can setup a mediaserver on the box so every media file is available for every device in my network. While you can get ffmpeg to be used as a transcoder, the formats you can transcode using a gpu are limited.Rookie_MIB - Monday, September 5, 2011 - link
Running two file servers at home right now - one is a media server:Cooler Master full tower case
Antec 580w power supply.
Gigabyte 785 board (5 sata, 2 ide ports)
Phenom II x2 550
2gb memory
1 x 20GB WD system drive (IDE - basic boot drive)
5 x 2TB Western Digital green drives (RAID5 SoftRAID)
FreeNAS 8.0
Been running for a few months now and no problems whatsoever. I have the drives running the standard RAID5 and haven't had any dropouts, rebuilds, anything. I had to upgrade it as I was running out of space on the previous setup:
Antec full tower
Antec 400w power supply
Gigabyte P4 board
Intel P4 @ 2.4ghz
No-name 4 port PCI raid card (SiS chipset)
1 x 40GB WD drive (system drive)
3 x 1TB Western Digital Green drives (RAID5 SoftRAID)
FreeNAS 7.0
That system was running for a few years with -no- issues beyond some reboot problems due to compatibility with FireWire which I finally tracked down (it would hang on reboot repeatedly if it ever shut down), but I never ran into problems with stability or corruption of the drives.
All in all, I tend to find that FreeNAS is a very solid solution if you're looking for a budget build. The only downside is that some of the older hardware is nowhere near as power efficient as some of the newer stuff such as the NAS enclosures running ARM hardware or the newer AMD stuff (I rule out Atom builds as well, they're vastly underpowered) running the E350's.
If I were to build a 'complete' system from the ground up I'd really look at a full enclosure (plenty of room for space) with an AMD ITX board with an E350 chip (5 sata plus an expansion card for 4 more sata ports). That would give you 1 boot drive, 8 file drives, 24tb of space which would probably draw somewhere in the neighborhood of 30-45 watts for the drives and around 30 watts for the system board/processor.
Sapan - Monday, September 5, 2011 - link
Hi guys, I am new to file severs so this may sound like a dumb question but I really need to know the answer:Currently I have 4 external hard drives (1TB, 1TB, 2TB, 3TB) each one about 75% filled and growing, and I wish to move all of that data to a home file server so I can access that data wherever I am and without having to plugin a hard drive every time. I plan to use 4x3TB
for the server but my question is when I setup a file server using windows home server 2011, will the drives show up as just one big drive (like Raid 0) or just 4 separate drives where I still have to manage HDD capacities? Because right now I have a lot of free space on each drive but they are separate and not as useful as they would be together. Also would it be easy to add another drive to my setup? Would it just join the pool of storage or show up as a separate drive? I know I could use RAID but again I am a novice and I worry about RAID's reliability and expandability. I hope my question makes sense? Thanks
jtag - Monday, September 5, 2011 - link
If you use RAID0, then any one drive failure will cause you to lose everything. Essentially RAID0 is the opposite of redundancy, each drive becomes a point of failure, decreasing the reliability of your array. Read this wiki article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID before you do anything. RAID0 should only ever be used to maximize performance, such as with swap partitions, never use it to store anything even remotely important.Some RAID schemes can be very reliable, for example a RAID6 will survive 2 drive failures, and with hot spares will automatically bring back redundancy by re-building onto those spares while you obtain replacements for the failed devices. That said, a RAID6 won't survive a fire, theft or user error, so you still need to make backups of anything important. Also the more drives you add (that increase capacity) the less reliable your RAID becomes, because each drive adds a new point of failure.
Software RAID, such as is used in Linux, can allow for expandability. I started my current home RAID as a RAID1 (mirror) of two 2TB drives. I added a third drive and using a handful if commands, grew and reshaped my array into a RAID5. Since then I've added three more drives and a second SATA controller card, and now have a RAID6 with a hot spare - essentially I added three drives to gain one drive of extra capacity.
I don't know how to do any of this in software under Windows, but I would expect/hope it would be possible. Being a novice means you're going the have to learn a lot before you do anything critical. My advice would be - make backups before you do anything, and run tests on non-critical/spare systems.
lamontagne - Wednesday, September 14, 2011 - link
I was previously planning on buying a Synology ds1511+, but after reading this article, I've been considering the building a WHS2011 file-server route to the tune of almost $300 cheaper.I've got 5 1.5TB hard drives and would get an SSD for the operating system.
I want to run a RAID 6, and build a mini-itx system as described, but I've been trying to figure out if I can have the RAID span across separate controllers (ie. mobo and PCI-E controller card). From your comment, it appears that this is a possibility.
Before I spend a bunch of cash, can you please confirm that fact for me...
billdcat4 - Monday, September 5, 2011 - link
Did you mean the G620T? It has a 35W TDP and a slim heatsink like the one pictured.I have a G620 and it came with the full height heatsink.
imaheadcase - Monday, September 5, 2011 - link
Unless you got something specific WHS won't do, no real reason not to get it. You can get it free if you are in college, and even then its only $50. Drop in the bucket for a server.I've built 10+ of them for people and not a single complaint. Restores just work, use it for media streaming, you can back up to cloud from it if you want, great add-ons, etc.
The MOST important thing of a server imo is the case. They are SO hard to find in the right config you want. Esp since lots of people use WHS next to media centers.
lamontagne - Wednesday, September 14, 2011 - link
WHS... free?That's great news. Do you know where to look for that?
Eiffel - Monday, September 5, 2011 - link
A great way to create a file server for those of us in the UK is to purchase an HP Microserver D36L (£130 or less after HP rebate).This machine comes with 1 GB of ECC DDR3, an AMD Athlon(tm) II Neo N36L Dual-Core Processor, and can take up to 6 SATA-II drives (or more with PCI cards or USB adapters). It doesn't include an operating system, but comes with a starter disk (250GB only)
Mine is set up with Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, 4 old 500GB WD500AAKS drives in Raid 5, plus a 2TB drive and an 80GB system drive... Performance is excellent as throughput is very close to Gb Ethernet's specs. There is also a growing base of WHS2011 users (atlhough some more memory -ECC or not- is needed for optimal results)
For redundancy, the easiest solution is to get a second D36L ;-)